CIA's "Torture Express" aircraft in Europe

[Marksix]

As a European based great lover of NYC I wanted to get your perspective on this. I and most of the people I know work in the airline industry. We all know the operators who fly "discrete" charters for unusual clients, mostly "freight" from Eastern Europe to African states using unmarked aircraft; it's an every day part of the business. Recently it has become common currency that the CIA or US government agencies operate what has become known as "Torture Express" aircraft (we know the aircraft and their reg. numbers) to ferry "suspects" around Europe and the rest of the world.

The appleation "Torture Express" is being applied because these flights have been observed loading "passengers" sometimes dressed in the requisite orange boiler suits with flight plans to Eastern Europe and North African states which it is acknowledged have somewhat dubious interrogation practices which would not be countenanced in the US or Western Europe.

The UK government, when questioned if it countenanced torture replied NO but when asked if evidenced obtained under torture would be acceptable, obfuscated.

The accusation is that the US government is taking people from the streets of Europe without any legal process to "friendly" states where they can be held indeffinitly and subjected to any level of torture without recourse. I guess it is being justified (if acknowledged at all) by reffering us to 9/11.

Please do not take this is an anti-American rant; I speak as a person whose girlfriend could have been on the bus blown up by Islamic extremists in London on 7/7. For what it is worth, we in the airline business whilst realists (for obvious reasons) take the view that we now have more than terrorists to fear and revile; now it is the governments too. I wanted to get your views as more than most, if done at all it is being done in your name.....

As a post script to this, here in the UK today we celebrate the prevention of a terrorist plot by religous extremeists to blow up the houses of parliament, the monarchy and the entire English establishment in order to establish a relgious state. The plot (402 years ago today) was uncovered by the torturing of one Guido Fawkes by the government in the Tower of London. His effigy will be burnt on bonfires througut the country tonight as it has been these past 400 years. Plus Ca Change as the French would say...

[Edward]

There was a good article in New Yorker about that, follow the link below to read it

OUTSOURCING TORTURE
The secret history of America’s “extraordinary rendition” program.
by JANE MAYER
Issue of 2005-02-14

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050214fa_fact6

[lofter1]

The events you describe -- along with the ill-conceived treatment of other prisoners and the seemingly sanctioned-from-the-top use of torture and other means that are at odds with the Geneva Convention -- are both troubling and embarassing to me as an American.

I believe that the majority of American people are beginning to wake up to the travesty of some of the Bush Administration's policies. People "in the know" are beginning to speak up:

Another Thunderbolt from Wilkerson

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, November 4, 2005

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100879.html


Another shocking accusation by former administration insider Lawrence Wilkerson appears to be going under the media radar today.

On NPR yesterday, the former chief of staff to the secretary of state said that he had uncovered a "visible audit trail" tracing the practice of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers directly back to Vice President Cheney's office.

Here's the audio (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4987598) of Wilkerson's interview with Steve Inskeep. The transcript is not publicly available, but here are the relevant excerpts:

"INSKEEP: While in the government, he says he was assigned to gather documents. He traced just how Americans came to be accused of abusing prisoners. In 2002, a presidential memo had ordered that detainees be treated in a manner consistent with the Geneva Conventions that forbid torture. Wilkerson says the vice president's office pushed for a more expansive policy.

"Mr. WILKERSON: What happened was that the secretary of Defense, under the cover of the vice president's office, began to create an environment -- and this started from the very beginning when David Addington, the vice president's lawyer, was a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions. Regardless of the president having put out this memo, they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to, in my view, what we've seen.

"INSKEEP: We have to get more detail about that because the military will say, the Pentagon will say they've investigated this repeatedly and that all the investigations have found that the abuses were committed by a relatively small number of people at relatively low levels. What hard evidence takes those abuses up the chain of command and lands them in the vice president's office, which is where you're placing it?

"Mr. WILKERSON: I'm privy to the paperwork, both classified and unclassified, that the secretary of State asked me to assemble on how this all got started, what the audit trail was, and when I began to assemble this paperwork, which I no longer have access to, it was clear to me that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of Defense down to the commanders in the field that in carefully couched terms -- I'll give you that -- that to a soldier in the field meant two things: We're not getting enough good intelligence and you need to get that evidence, and, oh, by the way, here's some ways you probably can get it.

And even some of the ways that they detailed were not in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war.

"You just -- if you're a military man, you know that you just don't do these sorts of things because once you give just the slightest bit of leeway, there are those in the armed forces who will take advantage of that. There are those in the leadership who will feel so pressured that they have to produce intelligence that it doesn't matter whether it's actionable or not as long as they can get the volume in. They have to do what they have to do to get it, and so you've just given in essence, though you may not know it, carte blanche for a lot of problems to occur."

Addington, incidentally, was promoted this week to the position of vice presidential chief of staff, replacing his indicted former boss, Scooter Libby. (For more on Addington, read my columns from Tuesday (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2005/11/01/BL2005110100876.html) and Wednesday (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/02/AR2005110201607_pf.html) .)
The only news service I have found that covered Wilkerson's comments on NPR was Agence France Presse (http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051103/pl_afp/uspoliticsjusticeiraq_051103182259) .

But if past is prologue, it will get picked up by more people soon.

In my October 20 column (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2005/10/20/BL2005102001131_pf.html) , I expressed surprise that Wilkerson's last thunderbolt hadn't made the front pages.

The previous day, he had given a speech in which he declared that a secret cabal led by the vice president has hijacked U.S. foreign policy and crippled the ability of the government to respond to emergencies.

But it's gotten a lot more attention since.

[TLOZ Link5]

I'm absolutely not surprised. I posted a related article in the "Bush Police State" thread.

[Marksix]

Thanks for the replies - you have restored my faith in the innate good sense of Americans and New Yorkers in particular. FYI the popular media here presents Americans as right wing trigger happy zealots intent on world domination, mostly in an effort to instill anti-americanism and not without some success so it is good to get the word straight from the horses mouth as it were.

Here in the UK we have also to put our own house in order and that is already happenning;Blair is finished and the anti civil liberties laws his government is trying to introduce under the pretext of "protecting" us from the bad guys are meeting stiff resistance.

Keep up the good fight.

[lofter1]

^ Just remember that NYC is almost an entirely different place in every way, shape, form and pattern of thought than 99% of the USA.

[Marksix]

^ Just remember that NYC is almost an entirely different place in every way, shape, form and pattern of thought than 99% of the USA.


...which is why we love it so.

[TLOZ Link5]

...which is why we love it so.

Thanks, Mark, we love you too :D

[lofter1]

Intersting that the GOP seems more worried about our questionable tactics than the ill-trust that such tactics might lead to ...

GOP LEADERS TO LAUNCH NEW 'LEAK' PROBE; INFO TO WASH POST 'DAMAGED NATIONAL SECURITY'

Tue Nov 08 2005 11:36:31 ET

http://www.drudgereport.com/flash2l.htm

Sources tell Drudge that early this afternoon House Speaker Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Frist will announce a bicameral investigation into the leak of classified information to the WASHINGTON POST regarding the “black sites” where high value al Qaeda terrorists are being held and interrogated.

MORE

Said one Hill source: “Talk about a leak that damaged national security! How will we ever get our allies to cooperate if they fear that their people will be targeted by al Qaeda.”

According to sources, the WASHINGTON POST story by Dana Priest (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101644_pf.html) (Wednesday November 2), revealed highly classified information that has already done significant damage to US efforts in the War on Terror.

Developing...


And here's the article in question \/ \/ \/

[lofter1]

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons

Debate Is Growing Within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas System Set Up After 9/11


By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 2, 2005; A01


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101644_pf.html


The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement
.
The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.

The existence and locations of the facilities -- referred to as "black sites" in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents -- are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.

The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.

While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.

But the revelations of widespread prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. military -- which operates under published rules and transparent oversight of Congress -- have increased concern among lawmakers, foreign governments and human rights groups about the opaque CIA system. Those concerns escalated last month, when Vice President Cheney and CIA Director Porter J. Goss asked Congress to exempt CIA employees from legislation already endorsed by 90 senators that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoner in U.S. custody.

Although the CIA will not acknowledge details of its system, intelligence officials defend the agency's approach, arguing that the successful defense of the country requires that the agency be empowered to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists for as long as necessary and without restrictions imposed by the U.S. legal system or even by the military tribunals established for prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.

The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.

The secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the working assumption was that a second strike was imminent.

Since then, the arrangement has been increasingly debated within the CIA, where considerable concern lingers about the legality, morality and practicality of holding even unrepentant terrorists in such isolation and secrecy, perhaps for the duration of their lives. Mid-level and senior CIA officers began arguing two years ago that the system was unsustainable and diverted the agency from its unique espionage mission.

"We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy," said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. "Everything was very reactive. That's how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don't say, 'What are we going to do with them afterwards?' "
It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials and other U.S. government officials. Legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA's internment practices also would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing.

Host countries have signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as has the United States. Yet CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA's approved "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. They include tactics such as "waterboarding," in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning.

Some detainees apprehended by the CIA and transferred to foreign intelligence agencies have alleged after their release that they were tortured, although it is unclear whether CIA personnel played a role in the alleged abuse. Given the secrecy surrounding CIA detentions, such accusations have heightened concerns among foreign governments and human rights groups about CIA detention and interrogation practices.

The contours of the CIA's detention program have emerged in bits and pieces over the past two years. Parliaments in Canada, Italy, France, Sweden and the Netherlands have opened inquiries into alleged CIA operations that secretly captured their citizens or legal residents and transferred them to the agency's prisons.

More than 100 suspected terrorists have been sent by the CIA into the covert system, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials and foreign sources. This figure, a rough estimate based on information from sources who said their knowledge of the numbers was incomplete, does not include prisoners picked up in Iraq.

The detainees break down roughly into two classes, the sources said.
About 30 are considered major terrorism suspects and have been held under the highest level of secrecy at black sites financed by the CIA and managed by agency personnel, including those in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, according to current and former intelligence officers and two other U.S. government officials. Two locations in this category -- in Thailand and on the grounds of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay -- were closed in 2003 and 2004, respectively.

A second tier -- which these sources believe includes more than 70 detainees -- is a group considered less important, with less direct involvement in terrorism and having limited intelligence value. These prisoners, some of whom were originally taken to black sites, are delivered to intelligence services in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Afghanistan and other countries, a process sometimes known as "rendition." While the first-tier black sites are run by CIA officers, the jails in these countries are operated by the host nations, with CIA financial assistance and, sometimes, direction.
Morocco, Egypt and Jordan have said that they do not torture detainees, although years of State Department human rights reports accuse all three of chronic prisoner abuse.

The top 30 al Qaeda prisoners exist in complete isolation from the outside world. Kept in dark, sometimes underground cells, they have no recognized legal rights, and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk with or even see them, or to otherwise verify their well-being, said current and former and U.S. and foreign government and intelligence officials.

Most of the facilities were built and are maintained with congressionally appropriated funds, but the White House has refused to allow the CIA to brief anyone except the House and Senate intelligence committees' chairmen and vice chairmen on the program's generalities.

The Eastern European countries that the CIA has persuaded to hide al Qaeda captives are democracies that have embraced the rule of law and individual rights after decades of Soviet domination. Each has been trying to cleanse its intelligence services of operatives who have worked on behalf of others -- mainly Russia and organized crime.

Origins of the Black Sites

The idea of holding terrorists outside the U.S. legal system was not under consideration before Sept. 11, 2001, not even for Osama bin Laden, according to former government officials. The plan was to bring bin Laden and his top associates into the U.S. justice system for trial or to send them to foreign countries where they would be tried.

"The issue of detaining and interrogating people was never, ever discussed," said a former senior intelligence officer who worked in the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, during that period. "It was against the culture and they believed information was best gleaned by other means."

On the day of the attacks, the CIA already had a list of what it called High-Value Targets from the al Qaeda structure, and as the World Trade Center and Pentagon attack plots were unraveled, more names were added to the list. The question of what to do with these people surfaced quickly.

The CTC's chief of operations argued for creating hit teams of case officers and CIA paramilitaries that would covertly infiltrate countries in the Middle East, Africa and even Europe to assassinate people on the list, one by one.
But many CIA officers believed that the al Qaeda leaders would be worth keeping alive to interrogate about their network and other plots. Some officers worried that the CIA would not be very adept at assassination.

"We'd probably shoot ourselves," another former senior CIA official said.

The agency set up prisons under its covert action authority. Under U.S. law, only the president can authorize a covert action, by signing a document called a presidential finding. Findings must not break U.S. law and are reviewed and approved by CIA, Justice Department and White House legal advisers.

Six days after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush signed a sweeping finding that gave the CIA broad authorization to disrupt terrorist activity, including permission to kill, capture and detain members of al Qaeda anywhere in the world.

It could not be determined whether Bush approved a separate finding for the black-sites program, but the consensus among current and former intelligence and other government officials interviewed for this article is that he did not have to.

Rather, they believe that the CIA general counsel's office acted within the parameters of the Sept. 17 finding. The black-site program was approved by a small circle of White House and Justice Department lawyers and officials, according to several former and current U.S. government and intelligence officials.

Deals With 2 Countries

Among the first steps was to figure out where the CIA could secretly hold the captives. One early idea was to keep them on ships in international waters, but that was discarded for security and logistics reasons.

CIA officers also searched for a setting like Alcatraz Island. They considered the virtually unvisited islands in Lake Kariba in Zambia, which were edged with craggy cliffs and covered in woods. But poor sanitary conditions could easily lead to fatal diseases, they decided, and besides, they wondered, could the Zambians be trusted with such a secret?

Still without a long-term solution, the CIA began sending suspects it captured in the first month or so after Sept. 11 to its longtime partners, the intelligence services of Egypt and Jordan.

A month later, the CIA found itself with hundreds of prisoners who were captured on battlefields in Afghanistan. A short-term solution was improvised. The agency shoved its highest-value prisoners into metal shipping containers set up on a corner of the Bagram Air Base, which was surrounded with a triple perimeter of concertina-wire fencing. Most prisoners were left in the hands of the Northern Alliance, U.S.-supported opposition forces who were fighting the Taliban.

"I remember asking: What are we going to do with these people?" said a senior CIA officer. "I kept saying, where's the help? We've got to bring in some help. We can't be jailers -- our job is to find Osama."

Then came grisly reports, in the winter of 2001, that prisoners kept by allied Afghan generals in cargo containers had died of asphyxiation. The CIA asked Congress for, and was quickly granted, tens of millions of dollars to establish a larger, long-term system in Afghanistan, parts of which would be used for CIA prisoners.

The largest CIA prison in Afghanistan was code-named the Salt Pit. It was also the CIA's substation and was first housed in an old brick factory outside Kabul. In November 2002, an inexperienced CIA case officer allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets. He froze to death, according to four U.S. government officials. The CIA officer has not been charged in the death.

The Salt Pit was protected by surveillance cameras and tough Afghan guards, but the road leading to it was not safe to travel and the jail was eventually moved inside Bagram Air Base. It has since been relocated off the base.

By mid-2002, the CIA had worked out secret black-site deals with two countries, including Thailand and one Eastern European nation, current and former officials said. An estimated $100 million was tucked inside the classified annex of the first supplemental Afghanistan appropriation.

Then the CIA captured its first big detainee, in March 28, 2002. Pakistani forces took Abu Zubaida, al Qaeda's operations chief, into custody and the CIA whisked him to the new black site in Thailand, which included underground interrogation cells, said several former and current intelligence officials. Six months later, Sept. 11 planner Ramzi Binalshibh was also captured in Pakistan and flown to Thailand.

But after published reports revealed the existence of the site in June 2003, Thai officials insisted the CIA shut it down, and the two terrorists were moved elsewhere, according to former government officials involved in the matter. Work between the two countries on counterterrorism has been lukewarm ever since.

In late 2002 or early 2003, the CIA brokered deals with other countries to establish black-site prisons. One of these sites -- which sources said they believed to be the CIA's biggest facility now -- became particularly important when the agency realized it would have a growing number of prisoners and a shrinking number of prisons.

Thailand was closed, and sometime in 2004 the CIA decided it had to give up its small site at Guantanamo Bay. The CIA had planned to convert that into a state-of-the-art facility, operated independently of the military. The CIA pulled out when U.S. courts began to exercise greater control over the military detainees, and agency officials feared judges would soon extend the same type of supervision over their detainees.

In hindsight, say some former and current intelligence officials, the CIA's problems were exacerbated by another decision made within the Counterterrorist Center at Langley.

The CIA program's original scope was to hide and interrogate the two dozen or so al Qaeda leaders believed to be directly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, or who posed an imminent threat, or had knowledge of the larger al Qaeda network. But as the volume of leads pouring into the CTC from abroad increased, and the capacity of its paramilitary group to seize suspects grew, the CIA began apprehending more people whose intelligence value and links to terrorism were less certain, according to four current and former officials.
The original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible universe was lowered or ignored, they said. "They've got many, many more who don't reach any threshold," one intelligence official said.

Several former and current intelligence officials, as well as several other U.S. government officials with knowledge of the program, express frustration that the White House and the leaders of the intelligence community have not made it a priority to decide whether the secret internment program should continue in its current form, or be replaced by some other approach.

Meanwhile, the debate over the wisdom of the program continues among CIA officers, some of whom also argue that the secrecy surrounding the program is not sustainable.

"It's just a horrible burden," said the intelligence official.


Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

[Ninjahedge]

I wonder if there is any way to upgrade from coach to first class......

[lofter1]

Senator tells CNN he believes Republican leaked info on CIA jails
RAW STORY (http://rawstory.com/)

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Senator Trent Lott (R-MS) told CNN's Ed Henry Tuesday afternoon that he believed it was a Republican senator who gave information about secret CIA jails abroad to the Washington Post, RAW STORY (http://rawstory.com/) can report.

Lott said that much of the information contained in the Post report -- which stated that the U.S. was holding terrorist suspects in secret CIA jails overseas -- was discussed at a meeting of Republican senators last Tuesday.

The revelation appears to torpedo the political gambit of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) who called on the Senate and House intelligence committees to investigate who leaked the information to the Post.

The Post story cited as sources "U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement."

More via Eschaton (http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_11_06_atrios_archive.html#113148475467778198) .

CNN's Ed Henry: "Trent Lott stunned reporters by declaring that this subject was actualy discussed at a Senate Republican luncheon, Republican senators only, last tuesday the day before the story ran in the Washington Post. Lott noted that Vice President Cheney was also in the room for that discussion and Lott said point blank "a lot of it came out of that room last tuesday, pointing to the room where the lunch was held in the capitol." He added of senators "we can't keep our mouths shut." He added about the vice president, "He was up here last wek and talked up here in that room right there in a roomful of nothing but senators and every word that was said in there went right to the newspaper." He said he believes when all is said and done it may wind up as an ethics investigation of a Republican senator, maybe a Republican staffer as well. Senator Frist's office not commenting on this development. The Washington Post not commenting either."

DEVELOPING HARD...

[lofter1]

Poor Scotty, so much to explain ...

White House Briefing:
McClellan Deflects Questions on Torture Exemption A Couple Dozen Times

By E&P Staff

Published: November 08, 2005
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001436211



NEW YORK At today's White House press briefing, Scott McClellan was hit with a number of questions about the "ethics classes" the president's staffers are now attending. But much of the briefing featured efforts by Helen Thomas, at the start, and then other reporters to get McClellan to explain the apparent contradiction between his claims that the U.S. does not torture anyone and Vice President Cheney's request for an exemption in this matter.

Here are the exchanges from the transcript:

****

Q I'd like you to clear up, once and for all, the ambiguity about torture. Can we get a straight answer? The President says we don't do torture, but Cheney --

MR. McCLELLAN: That's about as straight as it can be.

Q Yes, but Cheney has gone to the Senate and asked for an exemption on --

MR. McCLELLAN: No, he has not. Are you claiming he's asked for an exemption on torture? No, that's --

Q He did not ask for that?

MR. McCLELLAN: -- that is inaccurate.

Q Are you denying everything that came from the Hill, in terms of torture?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, you're mischaracterizing things. And I'm not going to get into discussions we have --

Q Can you give me a straight answer for once?

MR. McCLELLAN: Let me give it to you, just like the President has. We do not torture. He does not condone torture and he would never --

Q I'm asking about exemptions.

MR. McCLELLAN: Let me respond. And he would never authorize the use of torture. We have an obligation to do all that we can to protect the American people. We are engaged --

Q That's not the answer I'm asking for --

MR. McCLELLAN: It is an answer -- because the American people want to know that we are doing all within our power to prevent terrorist attacks from happening. There are people in this world who want to spread a hateful ideology that is based on killing innocent men, women and children. We saw what they can do on September 11th --

Q He didn't ask for an exemption --

MR. McCLELLAN: -- and we are going to --

Q -- answer that one question. I'm asking, is the administration asking for an exemption?

MR. McCLELLAN: I am answering your question. The President has made it very clear that we are going to do --

Q You're not answering -- yes or no?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, you don't want the American people to hear what the facts are, Helen, and I'm going to tell them the facts.

Q -- the American people every day. I'm asking you, yes or no, did we ask for an exemption?

MR. McCLELLAN: And let me respond. You've had your opportunity to ask the question. Now I'm going to respond to it.

Q If you could answer in a straight way.

MR. McCLELLAN: And I'm going to answer it, just like the President -- I just did, and the President has answered it numerous times.

Q -- yes or no --

MR. McCLELLAN: Our most important responsibility is to protect the American people. We are engaged in a global war against Islamic radicals who are intent on spreading a hateful ideology, and intent on killing innocent men, women and children.

Q Did we ask for an exemption?

MR. McCLELLAN: We are going to do what is necessary to protect the American people.

Q Is that the answer?

MR. McCLELLAN: We are also going to do so in a way that adheres to our laws and to our values. We have made that very clear. The President directed everybody within this government that we do not engage in torture. We will not torture. He made that very clear.

Q Are you denying we asked for an exemption?

MR. McCLELLAN: Helen, we will continue to work with the Congress on the issue that you brought up. The way you characterize it, that we're asking for exemption from torture, is just flat-out false, because there are laws that are on the books that prohibit the use of torture. And we adhere to those laws.

Q We did ask for an exemption; is that right? I mean, be simple -- this is a very simple question.

MR. McCLELLAN: I just answered your question. The President answered it last week.

Q What are we asking for?
Q Would you characterize what we're asking for?

MR. McCLELLAN: We're asking to do what is necessary to protect the American people in a way that is consistent with our laws and our treaty obligations. And that's what we --

Q Why does the CIA need an exemption from the military?

MR. McCLELLAN: David, let's talk about people that you're talking about who have been brought to justice and captured. You're talking about people like Khalid Shaykh Muhammad; people like Abu Zubaydah.

Q I'm asking you --

MR. McCLELLAN: No, this is facts about what you're talking about.

Q Why does the CIA need an exemption from rules that would govern the conduct of our military in interrogation practices?

MR. McCLELLAN: There are already laws and rules that are on the books, and we follow those laws and rules. What we need to make sure is that we are able to carry out the war on terrorism as effectively as possible, not only --

Q What does that mean --

MR. McCLELLAN: What I'm telling you right now -- not only to protect Americans from an attack, but to prevent an attack from happening in the first place. And, you bet, when we capture terrorist leaders, we are going to seek to find out information that will protect -- that prevent attacks from happening in the first place. But we have an obligation to do so. Our military knows this; all people within the United States government know this. We have an obligation to do so in a way that is consistent with our laws and values.

Now, the people that you are bringing up -- you're talking about in the context, and I think it's important for the American people to know, are people like Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi Binalshibh -- these are -- these are dangerous killers.

Q So they're all killers --
Q Did you ask for an exemption on torture? That's a simple question, yes or no.

MR. McCLELLAN: No. And we have not. That's what I told you at the beginning.

Q You want to reserve the ability to use tougher tactics with those individuals who you mentioned.

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, obviously, you have a different view from the American people. I think the American people understand the importance of doing everything within our power and within our laws to protect the American people.

Q Scott, are you saying that Cheney did not ask --
Q What is it that you want the -- what is it that you want the CIA to be able to do that the U.S. Armed Forces are not allowed to do?

MR. McCLELLAN: I'm not going to get into talking about national security matters, Bill. I don't do that, because this involves --

Q This would be the exemption, in other words.

MR. McCLELLAN: This involves information that relates to doing all we can to protect the American people. And if you have a different view -- obviously, some of you on this room -- in this room have a different view, some of you on the front row have a different view.

Q We simply are asking a question.
Q What is the Vice President -- what is the Vice President asking for?

MR. McCLELLAN: It's spelled out in our statement of administration policy in terms of what our views are. That's very public information. In terms of our discussions with members of Congress --

Q -- no, it's not --

MR. McCLELLAN: In terms of our members -- like I said, there are already laws on the books that we have to adhere to and abide by, and we do. And we believe that those laws and those obligations address these issues.

Q So then why is the Vice President continuing to lobby on this issue? If you're very happy with the laws on the books, what needs change?

MR. McCLELLAN: Again, you asked me -- you want to ask questions of the Vice President's office, feel free to do that. We've made our position very clear, and it's spelled out on our website for everybody to see.

Q We don't need a website, we need you from the podium.

MR. McCLELLAN: And what I just told you is what our view is.

Q But Scott, do you see the contradiction --

MR. McCLELLAN: Jessica, go ahead.

[Ninjahedge]

It is like a ping pong match.

They did not ask for a verbatim "exemption", but they did ask to be given rights and privileges not granted to the military in regards to CIA interrogations of terrorist suspects.

IOW, they asked for an exemption.

There are some classic lines in there too:

Q If you could answer in a straight way.

MR. McCLELLAN: And I'm going to answer it, just like the President -- I just did, and the President has answered it numerous times.

Q -- yes or no --

MR. McCLELLAN: Our most important responsibility is to protect the American people. We are engaged in a global war against Islamic radicals who are intent on spreading a hateful ideology, and intent on killing innocent men, women and children.

yep, just like the President. You avoid the question and continue to prattle on about the global Dr. Evil that threatens us all and our Good Faithful Upstanding citizens and Government doing all they can in their Holy Power to save the Poor Innocent Women and Children from this Hateful Menace.

PRAISE THE LORD!!! :p

[Marksix]

FYI the UK Government lost a vote in the House of Commons today whereby they were asking - at the behest of the police, for internment for up to 90 days any person the police deemed to be a terrorist suspect. No evidence, no trial, no charge need be applied therefore no lawyer neccessary.

What in fact would have happened is that the police, true to form would have locked up hundreds of mostly Asians causing the same kind of racial tensions we saw in France this last week or even worse, radicalising previously moderate muslims.

PM Blair staked his leadership on this and also his credibility. He got his answer! The politics of fear is no longer working here as it seems it is starting (not) to over in the US too.

[lofter1]

The politics of fear is no longer working here as it seems it is starting (not) to over in the US too.
Hopefully that tide is turning ...

[lofter1]

Doing Unto Others as They Did Unto Us

By M. GREGG BLOCHE and JONATHAN H. MARKS
New York Times
Op-Ed Contributors
November 14, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/14/opinion/14blochemarks.html


Washington — How did American interrogation tactics after 9/11 come to include abuse rising to the level of torture? Much has been said about the illegality of these tactics, but the strategic error that led to their adoption has been overlooked.

The Pentagon effectively signed off on a strategy that mimics Red Army methods. But those tactics were not only inhumane, they were ineffective. For Communist interrogators, truth was beside the point: their aim was to force compliance to the point of false confession.

Fearful of future terrorist attacks and frustrated by the slow progress of intelligence-gathering from prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Pentagon officials turned to the closest thing on their organizational charts to a school for torture. That was a classified program at Fort Bragg, N.C., known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Based on studies of North Korean and Vietnamese efforts to break American prisoners, SERE was intended to train American soldiers to resist the abuse they might face in enemy custody.

The Pentagon appears to have flipped SERE's teachings on their head, mining the program not for resistance techniques but for interrogation methods. At a June 2004 briefing, the chief of the United States Southern Command, Gen. James T. Hill, said a team from Guantánamo went "up to our SERE school and developed a list of techniques" for "high-profile, high-value" detainees.

General Hill had sent this list - which included prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation, stress positions, physical assault and the exploitation of detainees' phobias - to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who approved most of the tactics in December 2002.

Some within the Pentagon warned that these tactics constituted torture, but a top adviser to Secretary Rumsfeld justified them by pointing to their use in SERE training, a senior Pentagon official told us last month.

When internal F.B.I. e-mail messages critical of these methods were made public earlier this year, references to SERE were redacted. But we've obtained a less-redacted version of an e-mail exchange among F.B.I. officials, who refer to the methods as "SERE techniques." We also learned from a Pentagon official that the SERE program's chief psychologist, Col. Morgan Banks, issued guidance in early 2003 for the "behavioral science consultants" who helped to devise Guantánamo's interrogation strategy (we've been unable to learn the content of that guidance).

SERE methods are classified, but the program's principles are known. It sought to recreate the brutal conditions American prisoners of war experienced in Korea and Vietnam, where Communist interrogators forced false confessions from some detainees, and broke the spirits of many more, through Pavlovian and other conditioning. Prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, painful body positions and punitive control over life's most intimate functions produced overwhelming stress in these prisoners. Stress led in turn to despair, uncontrollable anxiety and a collapse of self-esteem.

Sometimes hallucinations and delusions ensued. Prisoners who had been through this treatment became pliable and craved companionship, easing the way for captors to obtain the "confessions" they sought.

SERE, as originally envisioned, inoculates American soldiers against these techniques. Its psychologists create mock prison regimens to study the effects of various tactics and identify the coping styles most likely to withstand them. At Guantánamo, SERE-trained mental health professionals applied this knowledge to detainees, working with guards and medical personnel to uncover resistant prisoners' vulnerabilities. "We know if you've been despondent; we know if you've been homesick," General Hill said. "That is given to interrogators and that helps the interrogators" make their plans.

Within the SERE program, abuse is carefully controlled, with the goal of teaching trainees to cope. But under combat conditions, brutal tactics can't be dispassionately "dosed." Fear, fury and loyalty to fellow soldiers facing mortal danger make limits almost impossible to sustain.

By bringing SERE tactics and the Guantánamo model onto the battlefield, the Pentagon opened a Pandora's box of potential abuse.
On Nov. 26, 2003, for example, an Iraqi major general, Abed Hamed Mowhoush, was forced into a sleeping bag, then asphyxiated by his American interrogators. We've obtained a memorandum from one of these interrogators - a former SERE trainer - who cites command authorization of "stress positions" as justification for using what he called "the sleeping bag technique."

"A cord," he explained, "was used to limit movement within the bag and help bring on claustrophobic conditions." In SERE, he said, this was called close confinement and could be "very effective." Those who squirmed or screamed in the sleeping bag, he said, were "allowed out as soon as they start to provide information."

Three soldiers have been ordered to stand trial on murder charges in General Mowhoush's death. Yet the Pentagon cannot point to any intelligence gains resulting from the techniques that have so tarnished America's image. That's because the techniques designed by communist interrogators were created to control a prisoner's will rather than to extract useful intelligence.

A full account of how our leaders reacted to terrorism by re-engineering Red Army methods must await an independent inquiry. But the SERE model's embrace by the Pentagon's civilian leaders is further evidence that abuse tantamount to torture was national policy, not merely the product of rogue freelancers. After the shock of 9/11 - when Americans desperately wanted mastery over a world that suddenly seemed terrifying - this policy had visceral appeal. But it's the task of command authority to connect means and ends rationally. The Bush administration has too frequently failed to do this. And so it is urgent that Congress step in to tie our detainee policy to our national interest.


M. Gregg Bloche is a law professor at Georgetown University and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. Jonathan H. Marks, a barrister in London, is a bioethics fellow at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins.


Copyright 2005 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[TLOZ Link5]

Apparently, the only way that Bush will veto a spending bill is if there's an anti-torture proclamation hidden in it somewhere. An old, but still viable, article:

Bush will veto anti-torture law after Senate revolt
By Francis Harris in Washington
(Filed: 07/10/2005)

The Bush administration pledged yesterday to veto legislation banning the torture of prisoners by US troops after an overwhelming and almost unprecedented revolt by loyalist congressmen.

The mutiny was the latest setback for an administration facing an increasingly independent and bloody-minded legislature. But it also marked a key moment in Congress's campaign to curtail the huge powers it has granted the White House since 2001 in its war against terrorism.

The late-night Senate vote saw the measure forbidding torture passed by 90 to nine, with most Republicans backing the measure. Most senators said the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal and similar allegations at the Guantanamo Bay prison rendered the result a foregone conclusion.

The administration's extraordinary isolation was underlined when the Senate Republican majority leader, Bill Frist, supported the amendment.

The man behind the legislation, Republican Senator John McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner in Vietnam, said the move was backed by American soldiers. His amendment would prohibit the "cruel, inhumane or degrading" treatment of prisoners in the custody of America's defence department.

The vote was one of the largest and best supported congressional revolts during President George W Bush's five years in office and shocked the White House.

"We have put out a Statement of Administration Policy saying that his advisers would recommend that he vetoes it if it contains such language," White House spokesman Scott McClellan warned yesterday.

The administration said Congress was attempting to tie its hands in the war against terrorism.

The veto would be Mr Bush's first use of his most extreme legislative option. But senators pointed out that a presidential veto can be overturned by a two-thirds majority in both houses.

For now the amendment's fate depends on negotiations between the Senate and the lower chamber, the House of Representatives, which is more loyal to the administration.

But senators said they were confident that most of the language would survive and that the issue could pose an extremely awkward dilemma for the president.

The amendment was attached to the $440 billion (£247 billion) defence spending bill and if Mr Bush vetoes the amendment, he would have to veto the entire bill.

That would leave America's armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan short of cash as early as the middle of next month.

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005.

[ablarc]

^ What happened with this? Where's the rest of the story?

[lofter1]

Andrew Sullivan has been giving great coverage to the Torture issue: http://www.andrewsullivan.com/

Another recent post ...
The US and Torture

Sebastian Holsclaw
November 15, 2005
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/


It has become increasingly clear that the current administration has taken a disturbingly permissive attitude toward torture. (See here (http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2005/11/but_wait_theres.html) or here (http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2005/10/cheney_the_cia_.html) for further exploration of the topic).

Though it is crass to quote yourself, I'm going to reprint most of my open letter to my party, the Republican Party, from here (http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2005/02/exhortation.html) anyway. Then I'm going to discuss more recent developments:
There has been a drip, drip, drip that we have mostly ignored. It does us no credit to continue. There are many sources for this information, but the New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050214fa_fact6) has an excellent overview. The Bush administration has engaged in a very troubling pattern of legitimizing torture by dramatically expanding the practice of "extraordinary rendition". This practice essentially amounts to sending people to other countries to be tortured. An excellent blog source for information on this practice is available on a section of ObsidianWings (http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/maher_arar/index.html). It has gotten to the point where it is obvious that this is more than a bad agent or two and it has expanded to far beyond just a few of the most hardened and obvious Al Qaeda operatives.

I wish I could just mention the program and assume that I didn't have to argue against it. Unfortunately I'm not entirely sure that is true. So before I get to what Republicans should do to stop it, I'm going to briefly outline why we should act to stop it:

Torture is wrong. The practice of extraordinary rendition began as a classic Clintonian hairsplitting exercise in the mid 1990s to avoid the clear letter of the laws which prohibit America from using torture. This is the kind of avoidance of the law and ridiculous semantics that we decried when employed by the Clinton administration. It has gotten no more attractive just because Bush has decided to continue the program.

We are torturing non-terrorists. Perhaps some people would be willing to torture Al Qaeda members. I'm not one of them, but perhaps some are. The problem with that mindset is that we aren't just torturing Al Qaeda members. It is becoming completely obvious that some of the people being tortured are innocent. See especially the ObsidianWings link above. That is crazy. There isn't any information we are getting that could possibly justify the torture of innocent people.

Torture is ineffective. Torture isn't ineffective at getting information per se. It is ineffective at getting useful information. That is because the victim either snaps completely, or starts trying to mold his story to fit what the torturer wants to hear. There is evidence that we have relied on information obtained through torture, only to find that it was very wrong.

Torture also opens us up to the legitimate criticism that we are acting out the very barbarism that we want to fight. I think as Republicans we have heard that charge so many times employed against practices where the analogy was completely inappropriate, that we have become inured to the charge when properly employed. This is a case where the charge has force. Go watch the Nick Berg Beheading Video (http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/decapitation_video.htm) and then imagine the blood pouring from his neck being just like the blood oozing from the fingers of an innocent torture victim sent to his fate by the CIA. That is the barbarism we are fighting, and that is the barbarism we must not become a part of. I know we have heard the charge that we are acting "just like them" thrown at us over trivial concerns like suggesting that we pay a bit more attention to visa-holders from other countries. This is NOT THAT CASE. This is the case of saying we are acting just like them because we are torturing people--acting just like them.

Therefore extraordinary rendition is a moral sinkhole, which is being employed on people we are not sure are guilty, and which doesn't even get good information. It cannot be continued.

The Republican Party has spent so many years in the minority that sometimes I think we have not adjusted to the fact that we are in power. We are in power now. We control both Houses of Congress and we have our people throughout the administration. We don't need to wait for the Democrats to raise this issue. We can't hide behind the worry that exploring our practices is going to get a President elected who is going to retreat from Iraq. We are the party which leads the most powerful country in the world. And lead it we must. President Bush must be shown that the Republican Party is not willing to stand for the perversion of our moral standards. The Republican-controlled Senate and the Republican-controlled House can close the loophole which allows for extraordinary rendition and can loudly reaffirm that torture is not something we do. We are the majority party, and we claim to be a party that cares about the moral health of the nation. We are damning ourselves if we sit back and let it continue. This practice is foolish in the proverbial sense of the word--it perverts our moral core and gains us nothing but the illusion of doing something important.
Since I wrote this, we have more proof that torture isn't effective at getting good intelligence, and can in fact obtain dramatically misleading misinformation.

This is especially true because we have been copying the torture techniques of Communist countries (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/14/opinion/14blochemarks.html):


Continue reading "The US and Torture" » (http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2005/11/the_us_and_tort.html#more)

[Marksix]

...seen at a few airports around Europe and also said to have been seen in Afghanistan . You can easily trace its' frame number and also the owners, listed as Path Corporation.


am unable to load the photo but follow this link to see the actual aircraft: http://www.airliners.net/open.file/848894/M/

[lofter1]

here it is:

http://c4.maxserving.com/iserver/site=5498/area=side_ros/aamfmt=normal/aamsz=sideunit/PageID=1234567 (http://c4.maxserving.com/adclick/site=5498/area=side_ros/aamfmt=normal/aamsz=sideunit/PageID=1234567)http://www.airliners.net/graphics/photo_shadow_TL.gifhttp://www.airliners.net/graphics/photo_shadow_TTL.gifhttp://www.airliners.net/graphics/photo_shadow_T.gifhttp://www.airliners.net/graphics/photo_shadow_TTR.gifhttp://www.airliners.net/graphics/photo_shadow_TR.gifhttp://www.airliners.net/graphics/photo_shadow_TLL.gifhttp://images.airliners.net/photos/middle/4/9/8/848894.jpg (http://www.airliners.net/open.file?id=848894&size=L&width=1024&height=782&sok=&photo_nr=)

[TLOZ Link5]

Frightening how something so innocuous can conceal such a dark secret.

[lofter1]

European Probe to Check Suspect Planes


Tuesday November 22, 2005
By JAN SLIVA
Associated Press Writer

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5432814,00.html


PARIS (AP) - The head of an investigation into alleged secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe said Tuesday he was checking 31 suspect planes that landed in Europe in recent years and was trying to acquire past satellite images of sites in Romania and Poland.

If the European probe uncovers evidence of covert facilities, the potential impact ranges from major embarrassment for the United States to political turmoil in countries that might have participated, even unwittingly. Countries found housing secret detention centers also could be suspended or expelled from the 46-member Council of Europe, a human rights watchdog organization.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Swiss senator Dick Marty said the Council of Europe, on whose behalf he was investigating, had a "moral obligation'' to look into claims the CIA set up secret prisons on the continent to interrogate al-Qaida suspects.

He said that despite lack of proof, there were "many hints, such as suspicious moving patterns of aircraft, that have to be investigated.''

But given the limited powers of the Strasbourg-based council, Marty's chances of uncovering explosive state secrets seemed unclear. The U.S. government has neither confirmed nor denied the existence of such facilities.

Allegations the CIA hid and interrogated key al-Qaida suspects at Soviet-era compounds in Eastern Europe were first reported in The Washington Post on Nov. 2. The paper did not name the countries involved.

A day later, Human Rights Watch said it had evidence indicating the CIA transported suspected terrorists captured in Afghanistan to Poland and Romania. The New York-based group identified the Kogalniceanu military airfield in Romania and Poland's Szczytno-Szymany airport as possible sites for secret detention centers, saying it based its conclusion on flight logs of CIA aircraft from 2001 to 2004 that it had obtained.

In a report presented in Paris on Tuesday to the legal affairs committee of the Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly, Marty said other airports that might have been used by CIA aircraft in some capacity are Palma de Mallorca in Spain, Larnaca in Cyprus and Shannon in Ireland.

Marty's report - a copy of which was obtained by the AP - contends the aircraft are "alleged to belong to entities with direct or indirect links to the CIA. It is claimed these were used by the CIA to transport prisoners.''

He said he asked the Brussels, Belgium-based Eurocontrol air safety organization to provide details of 31 suspect planes that flew through Europe, in accordance with a list given to him by Human Rights Watch.
Member states send Eurocontrol - also known as the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation - flight logs of both civilian and military flights, but these are not published.

Marty also said he asked the European Union's Satellite Center in Spain to look up and hand over satellite images of suspect sites in Romania and Poland.

"When we talk about 'prisons,' they don't necessarily have to be for many people, they could be cells for a very small group of people, one or two,'' he said.

Marty said he was planning to ask authorities in the Council of Europe's member states whether they have been contacted in order to ``authorize secret detention in one form or another.''

He also said he intended to ask Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, to share any information the Senate may get from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on the possible existence of secret detention facilities outside the United States.

Earlier this month, the Senate voted to require National Intelligence Director John Negroponte to provide the Senate and House intelligence committees with details of any clandestine facilities where the United States holds or has held terrorism suspects.

On Tuesday, several EU countries - including Britain, the Netherlands and Finland - agreed to write the United States on behalf of the European Union requesting clarification of the reports of secret prisons.

Marty said the probe was not meant to spark anti-American feelings or question the U.S. fight against terrorism.

"This is absolutely not a crusade against America. I think all Europeans agree with Americans that we must fight terrorism,'' he said. "We do not want to weaken the fight against terrorism ... but this fight has to be fought by legal means. Wrongdoing only gives ammunition to both the terrorists and their sympathizers.''

The Council of Europe is the guardian of the European Convention on Human Rights, a legally binding human rights treaty signed by all 46 council members. The council itself has no direct jurisdiction over any country but can exercise political pressure.

Membership in the organization is considered prestigious for European countries as it attests to their attachment to Europe's human rights principles.

[lofter1]

The U.S. Policy of allowing "Torture" will haunt this country for years to come:

Torture claims 'forced US to cut terror charges'

· Dirty bomb evidence came from al-Qaida leaders
· CIA worried case would expose prison network

Jamie Wilson in Washington
Friday November 25, 2005
The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/story/0,12469,1650418,00.html?gusrc=rss

The Bush administration decided not to charge Jose Padilla with planning to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in a US city because the evidence against him was extracted using torture on members of al-Qaida, it was claimed yesterday.

Mr Padilla, a US citizen who had been held for more than three years as an "enemy combatant" in a military prison in North Carolina, was indicted on Tuesday on the lesser charges of supporting terrorism abroad. After his arrest in 2002 the Brooklyn-born Muslim convert was also accused by the administration of planning to blow up apartment blocks in New York using natural gas.

The administration had used his case as evidence of the continued threat posed by al-Qaida inside America.

Yesterday's New York Times, quoting unnamed current and former government officials, said the main evidence of Mr Padilla's involvement in the plots against US cities had come from two captured al-Qaida leaders, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, believed to be the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, and Abu Zubaydah, a leading al-Qaida recruiter. But the officials told the newspaper Mr Padilla could not be charged with the bomb plots because neither of the al-Qaida leaders could be used as witnesses as they had been subjected to harsh questioning and could open up charges from defence lawyers that their earlier statements resulted from torture. Officials also feared that their testimony could expose classified information about the CIA prison system in which the men were thought to be held.

The CIA has never publicly acknowledged it is detaining Mr Mohammed and Mr Zubaydah. It is not known where they are being held. But it was reported last month the CIA was using secret detention centres in eastern Europe, possibly in Poland and Romania, for interrogations, thus beyond the reach of US law.

Internal reviews by the CIA have raised questions about the treatment and credibility of the two men. The New York Times said one review, completed in spring last year by the CIA inspector general, found that in the first months after his capture Mr Mohammed had suffered excessive use of "waterboarding", a technique involving near drowning which entails the detainee being strapped to a board and then submerged.

Announcing the charges against Mr Padilla on Tuesday, the attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, repeatedly refused to answer questions on why none of the allegations involving attacks on the US had been included. "I am not going to talk about previous accusations and allegations that are outside the indictment," he said. However, the New York Times said the officials had emphasised that the government was not backing off its initial assertions about the seriousness of Mr Padilla's actions.

Mr Padilla was arrested at O'Hare airport in Chicago in 2002 after returning from Pakistan. President George Bush declared him an enemy combatant, and the administration resisted calls to charge and try him in civilian courts. His case became a cause célèbre, with human rights groups claiming it was an extreme example of how civil liberties had been brushed aside in pursuit of the war on terror.

Mr Padilla was handed over last week to the justice department for civilian proceedings, avoiding a potentially embarrassing supreme court showdown over how long the US government could hold one of its citizens in military custody without charges.

Torture has become an emotive issue around the world since prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq was uncovered. A new law sponsored by Senator John McCain, a former Republican presidential candidate and a war hero who was tortured in Vietnam, would ban inhumane treatment and oblige all US agencies to abide by international law on torture. The draft law was approved by 90 votes to nine in the Senate earlier this month, but the House of Representatives has yet to give its support and Dick Cheney has launched an aggressive effort to modify the legislation to allow the CIA to be exempted - causing the Washington Post to label him "Vice President for Torture" in an editorial.

[lofter1]

http://images.dailykos.com/images/user/3/cheneythanksgiving.gif

[lofter1]

This article shows how clueless the Torture-Mongers are.

McCain's clear statement that "the information was of no real use to the Vietnamese" contradicts what these folk so desperately want to prove ...

That McCain broke under torture doesn't make him any less of an American hero. But it does prove he's wrong to claim that harsh interrogation techniques simply don't work.

John McCain: Torture Worked on Me

Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2005
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/11/29/100012.shtml


Sen. John McCain is leading the charge against so-called "torture" techniques allegedly used by U.S. interrogators, insisting that practices like sleep deprivation and withholding medical attention are not only brutal - they simply don't work to persuade terrorist suspects to give accurate information.

Nearly forty years ago, however - when McCain was held captive in a North Vietnamese prison camp - some of the same techniques were used on him. And - as McCain has publicly admitted at least twice - the torture worked!

In his 1999 autobiography, "Faith of My Fathers," McCain describes how he was severely injured when his plane was shot down over Hanoi - and how his North Vietnamese interrogators used his injuries to extract information.
"Demands for military information were accompanied by threats to terminate my medical treatment if I did not cooperate," he wrote.

"I thought they were bluffing and refused to provide any information beyond my name, rank and serial number, and date of birth. They knocked me around a little to force my cooperation."

The punishment finally worked, McCain said. "Eventually, I gave them my ship's name and squadron number, and confirmed that my target had been the power plant."

Recalling how he gave up military information to his interrogators, McCain said: "I regret very much having done so. The information was of no real use to the Vietnamese, but the Code of Conduct for American Prisoners of War orders us to refrain from providing any information beyond our names, rank and serial number."

The episode wasn't the only instance when McCain broke under physical pressure.
Just after his release in May 1973, he detailed his experience as a P.O.W. in a lengthy account in U.S. News & World Report.

He described the day Hanoi Hilton guards beat him "from pillar to post, kicking and laughing and scratching. After a few hours of that, ropes were put on me and I sat that night bound with ropes."

"For the next four days, I was beaten every two to three hours by different guards . . . Finally, I reached the lowest point of my 5 1/2 years in North Vietnam. I was at the point of suicide, because I saw that I was reaching the end of my rope."

McCain was taken to an interrogation room and ordered to sign a document confessing to war crimes. "I signed it," he recalled. "It was in their language, and spoke about black crimes, and other generalities."

"I had learned what we all learned over there," McCain said. "Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine."
That McCain broke under torture doesn't make him any less of an American hero. But it does prove he's wrong to claim that harsh interrogation techniques simply don't work.

[Ninjahedge]

What a stupid article.

Interrogation tecniques do not work to get the information you want, not just to break a prisoner.

What a stupid STUPID statement this article is making.

It is like saying "Smashing things DOES make things change!!!"

But it obviously does not create anything (the change that we would be looking for).

I hate it when people play with somantics, especially when they know what the person meant in the first place.

[lofter1]

Just yesterday Bush unequivocally stated (yet again) that the war should be run by the military commanders and NOT the politicians in Washington.

Seemingly Rumsfeld didn't get that message ...

Top U.S. military officer contradicts his civilian boss

11/30/2005
http://www.abc15.com/news/morenews/index.asp?did=23049 (http://www.abc15.com/news/morenews/index.asp?did=23049)


WASHINGTON (AP) -- The nation's top military man, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, said American troops in Iraq have a duty to intercede and stop abuse of prisoners by Iraqi security personnel.

When Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld contradicted Pace, the general stood firm.

Rumsfeld told the general he believed Pace meant to say the U.S. soldiers had to report the abuse, not stop it.

Pace stuck to his original statement.

The unusual exchange occurred during a discussion at a news conference about the relationship between U.S. forces in Iraq and an Iraqi government considered sovereign by the United States.

A questioner asked whether the United States and its allies might be deemed responsible for preventing mistreatment of people under arrest in Iraq, given that the U.S. and its allies train Iraqi forces.

"There are a lot of people involved in this, dozens of countries trying to help train these Iraqi forces. Any instance of inhumane behavior is obviously worrisome and harmful to them when that occurs," Rumsfeld said. "Iraq knows, of certain knowledge, that they need the support of the international community. And a good way to lose it is to make a practice of something that is inconsistent with the values of the international community."

He added: "Now, you know, I can't go any further in talking about it.

Obviously, the United States does not have a responsibility when a sovereign country engages in something that they disapprove of."

Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked what orders the troops have to handle such incidents. He responded: "It is absolutely the responsibility of every U.S. service member if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene, to stop it."

He said soldiers who hear of but don't see an incident should deal with it through superiors of the offending Iraqis.

That's when Rumsfeld stepped to the microphone and said, "I don't think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it. It's to report it."

Pace then repeated to Rumsfeld that intervening when witnessing abuse is the order the troops must follow, not just reporting it.


On the Net:
Defense Department: http://www.defenselink.mil

Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press.

[TLOZ Link5]

I don't know who to side with here. If the military wants to intercede on the behalf of the inmate being tortured, then I can see where Pace is coming from. But at the same time, defying Rumsfeld is a disturbing concept in and of itself because it implies an undermining of civilian control of the military.

[lofter1]

Hmm, hard choice:

Defying Rumsfeld ... or defying the accepted International Rules of War?

[Marksix]

Quite apart from the barbarity of torture, the consequences of information obtained under torture are far reaching, especially when they are used by governments to shape or justify policy and laws. As an example, here in the UK the government wants to impose compulsory ID cards containing biometric data on the holder linked to multiple government, medical and law enforcement data bases.

There are many profound implications for this; it changes the relationship between citizen and government (actually we are subjects) meaning we have to justify ourselves to government and their agencies for the first time in our history. You will be required to produce the card on demand, to purchase a rail or air ticket even petrol and anything else the government deems. Databases will be used to categorise people by ethnicity, location - current past and future, political tendencies, union membership and many, many other infringements on privacy.

When first announced the government stated they were needed to protect us against terrorism. Police chiefs were rolled out to back up their position stating they had seen unspecified intelligence leaving them in no doubt that the threat was real, imminent and catastrophic justifying any infringement on civil liberties that i.d. cards would bring.

It has since transpired that the "intelligence" they were shown referred to so called "dirty bombs" planned to be detonated in UK cities. This "intelligence" has since been shown to obtained from a radical Muslim after many months of torture, since proven to be totally spurious.

The government has since admitted that i.d. cards would not have prevented ANY of the terrorist attacks in the UK or indeed in the US and are now justifying the £8 billion i.d. card bill on the prevention of identity theft....

It is just one indication of how cynical politicians will, if allowed, use even the degradation of common held values to make policy, law and even war and it can all be traced back to one person having a cattle prod shoved up his arse.


BTW - the last government to attempt a nation i.d. scheme backed up by databases was the German Nazi Part in the 1930's. It was invented by IBM expressly for Adolf Hitler to provide him with the first of many solutions to Germany's perceived problems that led to the Holocaust. Indeed, there was no solution IBM was unwilling to provide Hitler with.

Until the 12-year strategic alliance between IBM and the Nazi regime, people could be counted manually, but not individually identified. At the end of the 19th Century, IBM invented data processing with its Hollerith punch card system - that is, a simple process of storing information on individuals, places, objects and processes by mechanically punching select holes in designated columns and rows. In 1933, as Hitler wanted to identify the Jews and other 'enemies of the state' so he could target them for persecution, IBM energetically stepped forward, offering to create an automated system for Hitler's first national census. The company designed a census that not only counted heads but also recorded the characteristics of those heads by name and background. Throughout the 12-year Reich, IBM's technology helped the Nazis in all six phases of the Holocaust: identification, social exclusion, confiscation, ghettoisation, deportation and even extermination.

There was an IBM customer site, known as the Hollerith Department, in almost every concentration camp, from Auschwitz (IBM coded 001) to Dachau (IBM coded 003). It all began with national identification in 1933.

The system was used to target any designated enemy: for example, homosexuals (coded 2), Jehovah's Witnesses (3), Communists (6), Gypsies (2) and, of course, Jews (8).

As ever, US companies are at the forefront in bidding for contracts to supply the technology for the UK's i.d. cards and databases.

IBM’s punch cards were simply a piece of paper with holes in it. In practice, the technology was deadly.

I.D. cards are simple credit card like smart cards and as our government says - "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear"......

http://www.no2id.net/

[Ninjahedge]

Except fear itself.


Total indexing of the US population is a scary prospect.

-Citizen No: 4567-9851-7899-4

[TLOZ Link5]

Hmm, hard choice:

Defying Rumsfeld ... or defying the accepted International Rules of War?

It may be Rumsfeld, but it's still civilian control over the military. Who knows what repercussions that might have in future administrations?

[lofter1]

EXCLUSIVE: Sources Tell ABC News Top Al Qaeda Figures Held in Secret CIA Prisons

10 Out of 11 High-Value Terror Leaders Subjected to 'Enhanced Interrogation Techniques'

By BRIAN ROSS and RICHARD ESPOSITO
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=1375123


Dec. 5, 2005 — Two CIA secret prisons were operating in Eastern Europe until last month when they were shut down following Human Rights Watch reports of their existence in Poland and Romania.

Current and former CIA officers speaking to ABC News on the condition of confidentiality say the United States scrambled to get all the suspects off European soil before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived there today. The officers say 11 top al Qaeda suspects have now been moved to a new CIA facility in the North African desert.

CIA officials asked ABC News not the name the specific countries where the prisons were located, citing security concerns.

The CIA declines to comment, but current and former intelligence officials tell ABC News that 11 top al Qaeda figures were all held at one point on a former Soviet air base in one Eastern European country. Several of them were later moved to a second Eastern European country.

All but one of these 11 high-value al Qaeda prisoners were subjected to the harshest interrogation techniques in the CIA's secret arsenal, the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" authorized for use by about 14 CIA officers and first reported by ABC News on Nov. 18.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice today avoided directly answering the question of secret prisons in remarks made on her departure for Europe, where the issue of secret prisons and secret flights has caused a furor.

Without mentioning any country by name, Rice acknowledged special handling for certain terrorists.

"The captured terrorists of the 21st century do not fit easily into traditional systems of criminal or military justice, which were designed for different needs. We have had to adapt," Rice said.

The CIA has used a small fleet of private jets to move top al Qaeda suspects from Afghanistan and the Middle East to Eastern Europe, where Human Rights Watch has identified Poland and Romania as the countries that housed secret sites.

But Polish Defense Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told ABC Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross today: "My president has said there is no truth in these reports."

Ross asked: "Do you know otherwise, sir, are you aware of these sites being shut down in the last few weeks, operating on a base under your direct control?"

Sikorski answered, "I think this is as much as I can tell you about this."

In Romania, where the secret prison was possibly at a military base visited last year by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the new Romanian prime minister said today there is no evidence of a CIA site but that he will investigate.

Sources tell ABC that the CIA's secret prisons have existed since March 2002 when one was established in Thailand to house the first important al Qaeda target captured. Sources tell ABC that the approval for another secret prison was granted last year by a North African nation.

Sources tell ABC News that the CIA has a related system of secretly returning other prisoners to their home country when they have outlived their usefulness to the United States.

These same sources also tell ABC News that U.S. intelligence also ships some "unlawful combatants" to countries that use interrogation techniques harsher than any authorized for use by U.S. intelligence officers. They say that Jordan, Syria, Morocco and Egypt were among the nations used in order to extract confessions quickly using techniques harsher than those authorized for use by U.S. intelligence officers. These prisoners were not necessarily citizens of those nations.

According to sources directly involved in setting up the CIA secret prison system, it began with the capture of Abu Zabayda in Pakistan. After treatment there for gunshot wounds, he was whisked by the CIA to Thailand where he was housed in a small disused warehouse on an active airbase.

There, his cell was kept under 24-hour closed circuit TV surveillance and his life-threatening wounds were tended to by a CIA doctor especially sent from Langley headquarters to assure Abu Zubaydah was given proper care, sources said. Once healthy, he was slapped, grabbed, made to stand long hours in a cold cell and finally handcuffed and strapped feet up to a water board until after .31 seconds he begged for mercy and began to cooperate.

While in the secret facilities in Eastern Europe, Abu Zubaydah and his fellow captives were fed breakfasts that included yogurt and fruit, lunches that included steamed vegetables and beans, and dinners that included meat or chicken and more vegetables and rice, sources say. In exchange for cooperation, prisoners were sometimes given hard candies, deserts and chocolates. Abu Zubaydah was partial to Kit Kats, the same treat Saddam Hussein fancied in his captivity.

"One of the difficult issues in this new kind of conflict is what to do with captured individuals who we know or believe to be terrorists," Rice said. "The individuals come from many countries and are often captured far from their original homes. Among them are those who are effectively stateless, owing allegiance only to the extremist cause of transnational terrorism. Many are extremely dangerous. And some have information that may save lives, perhaps even thousands of lives."

Sources tell ABC News that Jordanians, Egyptians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Algerians, Saudis, Pakistanis, Uzbekistanis and Chinese citizens have been returned to their nations' intelligence services after initial debriefing by U.S. intelligence officers. Rice said renditions such as these are vital to the war on terror. "Rendition is a vital tool in combating transnational terrorism," she said.

Of the 12 high value targets housed by the CIA, only one did not require water boarding before he talked. Ramzi bin al-Shibh broke down in tears after he was walked past the cell of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the operational planner for Sept. 11. Visibly shaken, he started to cry and became as cooperative as if he had been tied down to a water board, sources said.

[Ninjahedge]

"The captured terrorists of the 21st century do not fit easily into traditional systems of criminal or military justice, which were designed for different needs. We have had to adapt," Rice said.

So we have to REGRESS in our interrogation techniques?

GJ Condi!

[lofter1]

America can't take it anymore

The Bush administration has embraced torture as a key part of the "war on terror."
Finally, members of Congress, the military and the CIA are speaking out against the abuse.

By Mark Follman
Dec. 5, 2005

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/12/05/torture_backlash/index.html


Five days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney instructed the nation that the U.S. government would begin working "the dark side" to defeat its enemies in a new global war. "A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion," Cheney declared on NBC's "Meet the Press." He added, "It's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal."

More than four years later, the Bush administration has delivered on Cheney's vow to wage war in the shadows, free from oversight and accountability.

Policies for seizing and interrogating suspects -- conceived and commanded at the highest levels of the White House -- have permitted numerous acts of torture and even murder at the hands of American soldiers and interrogators.

The grim acts unleashed by those policies are no secret today. Cruel and wanton abuses have been exposed at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and other lesser known U.S. military bases and prisons around the world. In November, the Washington Post uncovered a global network of covert CIA prisons known as "black sites," (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101644_pf.html) top-secret interrogation facilities reportedly operating in far-flung locations from Eastern Europe to Thailand. Still, many dark details remain unknown.

"There is no instance in American history where we've been exposed as being so deeply involved in actually conducting torture on a routine and regular basis," says Thomas Powers, an expert on national security and the author of two books on the CIA.

In recent months, a fierce backlash against the abuses has not only been rising in Washington, but well beyond. Many Americans on the front lines of national security are demoralized and angered by the fact that only a few foot soldiers have been punished -- such as Pvt. Lynndie England of Abu Ghraib infamy -- while commanders in the field and policymakers have remained untouched. A growing number of military and CIA personnel, according to officers from both realms, admit that the Bush policies, hatched in the fearful weeks and months after 9/11, have deeply corrupted military and intelligence operations over four years of war.

In October, the Senate passed the McCain amendment with overwhelming bipartisan support. It would impose uniform standards for interrogation on both the military and CIA, adhering to the Geneva Conventions' ban on torture and other "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of prisoners. As the amendment makes its way to the House, the Bush administration is fighting it every step of the way. Cheney is wielding his influence on both Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon, seeking to water down language in the McCain amendment and exempt the CIA from new guidelines.

Following the revelation of the black sites, President Bush stated: "We do not do torture." Much evidence proves otherwise, but what else could the president of the United States say? Torturing prisoners is both illegal and morally reprehensible. Committed by Americans, it has undermined the mission to bring democratic reform to Afghanistan, Iraq and the greater Middle East.

It has done profound damage to America's image at home and worldwide. And most intelligence experts, (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-johnson11nov11,0,7794527.story) including CIA director Porter Goss, (http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20051121/1a_lede21.art.htm) agree that when it comes to gathering useful information, torture simply doesn't work.

By now, the public may be desensitized to all the personal testimonials of torture brought to light in the media. In some cases, skepticism is warranted: Captured al-Qaida training manuals revealed instructions for prisoners to lie about being tortured to undermine the enemy. Military investigators have said they've found instances of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay making false allegations.

But evidence of widespread use of torture by the United States under the Bush administration is indisputable, including the policy of rendition, (http://dir.salon.com/topics/rendition/) or the handing over of prisoners to foreign allies like Jordan and Egypt who are known to torture. European leaders have been in an uproar (http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,387185,00.html) as further evidence emerges that the CIA has secretly used European airports to transport prisoners for interrogation.

The numbers alone tell a chilling story. According to recent reports by the Associated Press, the United States has held more than 83,000 prisoners since the war on terror began, primarily in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, more than 14,000 remain in U.S. custody, mostly in Iraq, where U.S. military officials have acknowledged in the past that many prisoners were of little or no intelligence value. Military officials have said the same of the majority of prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay; yet from Guantánamo to the war zones, more than 4,000 prisoners have been held for a year or longer, with several hundred held for multiple years.

As of March this year, 108 detainees were known to have died in U.S. military and CIA custody. Of those, 22 died when insurgents attacked Abu Ghraib prison, while others reportedly died of natural causes. At least 26 deaths have been deemed criminal homicides.

Particularly troubling, says Powers, is that the Bush White House has taken no responsibility for the long trail of illegal abuses committed in the name of fighting terror: "Has anybody high up been held accountable for those 26 homicides? Not that I know of. And I'd be very surprised if we ever learn the full extent of all this. My guess is that if we could see the whole picture, it'd be extremely dark and unpleasant."

Army Capt. Ray Kimball is among the growing number who say that interrogation by torture is anti-American, ineffective and categorically wrong.

In an interview with Salon, he said it also causes severe harm to U.S. soldiers themselves.

"Torture not only degrades the victim, it also ultimately degrades the torturer," said Kimball, who served in Iraq and now teaches history at West Point. "We already have enough soldiers dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder after legitimate combat experiences. But now you're talking about adding the burden of willfully inflicting wanton pain on another human being.

You tell a soldier to go out there and 'waterboard' someone" -- strap a prisoner to a board, bind his face in cloth, and pour water over his face until he fears death by drowning -- "or mock-execute someone, but nobody is thinking about what that's going to do to that soldier months or years later, when it comes to dealing with the rationalizations and internal consequences. We're talking about serious psychic trauma."

A few courageous soldiers, including Army Capt. Ian Fishback of the elite 82nd Airborne Division, have spoken out (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/27/AR2005092701527.html) against policies they say have cultivated torture on the battlefield. For 17 months, Fishback sought clarification within the military for the proper treatment of prisoners, and could find none. "I am certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder," Fishback wrote in an open letter to Sen. John McCain in September. "I and troops under my command witnessed some of these abuses in both Afghanistan and Iraq."

Coercion used on detainees, Fishback wrote, "is morally inconsistent with the Constitution and justice in war. It is unacceptable ... If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession."

More soldiers are starting to come forward with the support of groups like Human Rights Watch, (http://www.hrw.org/doc/?t=torture) which conducts leading research on torture in the war on terror. Although unwilling to talk on the record for fear of retribution by the military, a number of active-duty soldiers who've spoken with Human Rights Watch are increasingly angry about the torture scandals, according to researcher John Sifton. While some soldiers are wary that media and human rights groups are out to make the military look bad, Sifton says most of them realize that they are taking the sole blame for the abuses.

"A number of soldiers we've talked to have told us they were ordered by military intelligence to torture," Sifton told Salon. "And not just at Abu Ghraib but at forward operating bases across Iraq." According to Sifton, several soldiers who tried to report misconduct say their superiors told them to take a hike.

One of them was Army Spc. Tony Lagouranis, who worked as an interrogator at Abu Ghraib prison and in a special intelligence unit that operated across Iraq in 2004. After multiple attempts to report wrongdoing, he became frustrated by stonewalling inside the military and took his knowledge of abuses to the media.

"It's all over Iraq," Lagouranis, now retired, told (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/torture/interviews/lagouranis.html) the PBS show "Frontline" in late September. "The worst stuff I saw was from the detaining units who would torture people in their homes. They were using things like ... burns.

They would smash people's feet with the back of an axe-head. They would break bones, ribs." At the root of the abuses, he said, was a lot of "frustration that we weren't getting good intel," and murky directives regarding the treatment of prisoners. Inevitably, Lagouranis said, those conditions gave rise to instances of "pure sadism," like the ones at Abu Ghraib.

There are other accounts of stonewalling and coverup by the military: One Army whistleblower who tried to report abuses in Iraq in 2003 was suddenly declared psychologically ill and forcibly shipped out of the country. "They were determined to protect their own asses no matter who they had to take down," said Sgt. Frank "Greg" Ford, in a Salon report (http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/12/08/coverup/index.html) last year.

In a joint effort with Human Rights First and NYU's Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, Human Rights Watch has been amassing a database of "literally hundreds and hundreds of cases of torture" at the hands of the U.S. military and CIA that have gone uninvestigated or unresolved. "There are only two cases I know of in which an officer or senior NCO has been accused of criminal conduct because of actions of those under their command," Sifton said. While some lower-level troops who committed abuse have been rightfully punished, he said, "it's simply shocking that nobody higher up has been held criminally liable."

"The message that's going out to guys is, as long as you're a senior military member or administration staffer, you're golden," says one active-duty Army officer, a veteran of combat in Iraq. "Just make sure either you've got a fall guy, or you're high enough up in the hierarchy, and you'll be fine."

Beginning almost immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, policies crafted inside the Bush White House set the conditions for rampant abuses by the military and CIA. In the first fearful weeks and months after the attacks, top administration lawyers in the White House and Justice Department drew up a series of secret legal memos that recast the rules for the treatment of so-called enemy combatants, those considered terrorist suspects from no easily identifiable army or nation. The memos argued that captured enemy combatants were not entitled to fundamental protections of U.S. or international law, including the obligations of the U.N. Convention Against Torture, (http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/h_cat39.htm) a treaty the United States ratified in 1994 explicitly outlawing "torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" of prisoners.

The administration also relied on a classified document known as a "presidential finding," authorizing broad covert action by the CIA to capture, detain or kill members of al-Qaida anywhere in the world. The finding, which administration legal advisors apparently ruled lawful, was signed by Bush on Sept. 17, 2001. A day later, Congress granted the administration additional power by authorizing (http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/sept_11/sjres23_eb.htm) the use of "all necessary and appropriate" military force at the discretion of the president.

This November, in response to the torture scandals, the Pentagon issued a new high-level directive requiring that interrogations be conducted using "humane" treatment. That term replaced language in an earlier draft of the directive modeled after the international rules against torture -- a change that was made following intense pressure from Cheney's office.

According to one senior Army officer, a judge advocate general who has been involved in discussions with Pentagon officials on the issue, reaching a consensus on what constitutes "humane" treatment can be exceedingly difficult -- and vague language remains precisely the strategy of the Bush administration's legal maneuverings on detention and interrogation. Pentagon officials working to revise the Army field manual have also reportedly faced stiff resistance from Cheney's office. In theory, the senior Army JAG says, the rules outlined in the current version of the manual, including 14 techniques approved for interrogations, were already well-defined enough to avert wrongdoing -- at least until the Bush administration began calling for "the gloves to come off" in the war on terror.

According to the senior Army JAG, who wasn't authorized to speak to the media and was granted anonymity by Salon, many fellow JAGs and military officers feel that the administration has long since veered into dubious territory. "There are plenty of us who think that the legal opinions put forth by the administration, while maybe passable from a technical standpoint, aren't serving our long-term interests. The feeling is that there are steep costs to the administration's views, and that we're just beginning to pay them."

It is no accident that the McCain amendment seeks to tighten controls over both the military and CIA. The two often work in concert in an ill-defined, shadowy world of prisoner capture, transport and interrogation. While some abuses took place in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay prior to the Iraq war, conventional wisdom holds that torture only ballooned with the rise of the Iraqi insurgency. But according to one active-duty Army officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information, U.S. intelligence operatives were working alongside the military in the Middle East well before the war even began.

"Before the invasion of Iraq, I was on an airfield in a foreign country that had an OGA site operating on it," says the Army officer. (OGA, or "other government agency," is parlance for a nonmilitary agency, typically the CIA.)

"The airfield was prepped for any number of missions. It was made abundantly clear to us that those guys were self-sufficient and operated under their own set of rules. And if we didn't like that, that was too damn bad."

Robert Baer, a veteran CIA officer who operated in Iraq and across the Middle East before retiring in 1997, affirms that the CIA often works with military and private contractors, including on interrogations. He says joint operations are likely all over Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as at the "black sites," which, according to the Washington Post, were set up beginning nearly four years ago.

A recent report (http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/051114fa_fact) by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker revealed how the joint operations can shield any single agency from responsibility for torture. The killing of a terrorist suspect in U.S hands at Abu Ghraib in 2003 may go unpunished, according to the report, because of murky circumstances over whether the military or CIA had custody of him. The prisoner, Manadel al-Jamadi, was first captured and roughed up by Navy SEALS before being handed over to a CIA interrogator at the prison. The CIA interrogator reportedly placed a bag over al-Jamadi's head, bound his hands behind his back, and hung him by his hands. Top forensics experts who examined the case said al-Jamadi, who had broken ribs, suffocated to death.

Several military investigations have fingered the CIA for operations in Iraq that essentially made prisoners like al-Jamadi disappear within the military's detention system with no record of their captivity -- a practice known as "ghosting." To date, only one agency employee has been held to account, a CIA contractor -- but not an officer -- charged for beating a prisoner to death in Afghanistan.

The CIA has never had a sterling reputation on human rights, says author Thomas Powers, though no one inside the agency would ever admit to using torture. "They've also said they don't commit assassinations," Powers says wryly. "They don't, except when they do."

Nevertheless, Bush policies appear to have corrupted the CIA to an unprecedented degree. Between the torture scandals and the prewar intelligence meltdown -- Powers says analysts were made to "hop on one leg and whistle" while pumping up bogus intelligence on Iraqi WMD -- the CIA has become an "operational arm" of the Bush White House.

The network of secret CIA prisons is particularly disturbing, Powers says, because they make prospects for oversight and accountability even dimmer.
As with the military, it's likely that only the rank and file will be held accountable. "Over the last 50 years the agency has been asked many times to do extreme things," Powers says. "But almost always, whenever there's somebody to be blamed for it, nobody in the White House takes a hit."

Other CIA experts confirm that torture fails to exact useful information from prisoners, especially insurgents. "I've never seen torture solve an insurgency problem. It just makes it worse," Baer says. In addition to decrying its ineffectiveness, some veteran CIA officers, like their counterparts in the military, have begun to speak out (http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=32861&dcn=todaysnews) against torture on moral grounds.

"It goes completely against the profile of people the CIA wants to recruit," Baer says, adding that officers are trained to resist interrogation, but generally not to conduct it. "This is a 180-degree turn, and it's wrecking the CIA further."

The rising backlash against torture today indicates more military and intelligence officers are realizing that the Bush administration is sinking the United States into an unprecedented moral quagmire -- one that could lead to an especially dire end. "The problems with this are huge and they're hitting home now," Powers says. "How do you let these people go, especially the ones deemed to be of no intelligence value, after they've been treated so badly? Are you just going to hold them forever? You have to ask whether or not they will eventually reach the stage of just summarily killing them. It may have happened already. This policy isn't just ineffectual -- it's complete madness."

Last summer, Sen. Richard Durbin, a senior Democrat from Illinois who co-wrote the McCain amendment, was savaged (http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2005/06/17/durbin_gitmo/index.html?sid=1356001) by the White House for pointed criticisms he made comparing torture at the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay with Nazism and the Soviet gulags. Looking back, Durbin maintains he could have chosen his words more carefully -- but more importantly, he says, Cheney's battle against the McCain amendment represents a betrayal of America's men and women fighting on the front lines, and an "incredible contradiction" from the White House on torture.

For Durbin, who served on the Senate Intelligence Committee until last January, the revelation of the CIA "black sites" has raised new, troubling questions. "To my knowledge, it was never discussed -- whether they exist, where they exist, who runs them, and what's going on inside," Durbin said, speaking by phone from his office on Capitol Hill. "I think we absolutely need a more thorough investigation. But we'll be hard pressed to see it because it reflects directly on statements made by the president and vice president. And when it gets that delicate politically, the Senate Intelligence Committee has refused to step in."

That's been the norm under the Bush White House, Durbin adds. Cheney, he says, enjoys powerful sway over the committee. "There is a close relationship between Sen. Pat Roberts [who heads the Intelligence Committee] and the vice president. I can tell you that little or nothing was done while I served on the committee, in terms of a thorough review of our treatment of prisoners."

While Durbin and fellow lawmakers responsible for oversight were kept in the dark on covert interrogation operations, before he left the committee he and others viewed hundreds of classified photos of torture from Abu Ghraib.

According to Durbin, a number of the images they witnessed were even more horrific than the public has seen to date, though he declined to go into detail, because they remain classified. "In all of my years of public service, I'll never forget that day. I was standing there in a room with fellow senators, some of whom were in tears, as we watched brought up on a screen hundreds and hundreds of photos showing the most unimaginable treatment of prisoners."

"I honestly believe that when this war is over, we'll look back on this treatment of prisoners as our own Japanese internment-camp issue," Durbin says. "It's further illustration that when a nation is in fear, as we are of continued attacks of terrorism, a nation will do things that do not stand up well at all by the judgment of history."


Copyright ©2005 Salon Media Group, Inc.

[lofter1]

Rumsfeld questions policy on preventing Iraqi abuse of detainees

December 7, 2005

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051207/pl_afp/usiraqdetainees&printer=1 (http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051207/pl_afp/usiraqdetainees&printer=1;_ylt=Au78VLNFdBTz22A0uyU48qmtOrgF;_ylu=X 3oDMTA3MXN1bHE0BHNlYwN0bWE)


Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has questioned a policy that requires US military personnel who witness abuse of detainees in Iraqi custody to take "all reasonable actions" to prevent it, a spokesman said.

Rumsfeld seemed taken aback last month when General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, told him at a news conference that all US military personnel had the responsibility to try to stop abuse that they witness.

( link: http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showpost.php?p=74938&postcount=29 )

Since then, Rumsfeld has raised questions about the policy, said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman.

He indicated that a key question is what happens when a permanent, sovereign government is formed in Iraq following elections December 15.

"Our forces are in a sovereign nation and the law enforcement of that nation is the responsibility of that country," Whitman said.

At the same time, he said, "This is a new democracy. We know that this is tough stuff, and it's a change, a dramatic change from the way things were done in the past."

The problem came to the fore last month when US and Iraqi troops raided an Iraqi Interior Ministry jail in Baghdad and found about 170 detainees who had been abused and in some cases tortured.

A top commander in Iraq told reporters last week that US military intelligence is drawing up a list of other suspected Interior Ministry jails for inspection by US-Iraqi teams.

Whitman said US service members would be expected to try to persuade Iraqis abusing prisoners that their behavior is "inappropriate" and to report it up their chain of command.

But General George Casey, the commander of the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I), issued a policy directive earlier this year setting a higher standard of responsibility for US troops who witness abuse of detainees in Iraqi custody.

"It is the responsibility of all MNF-I units and personnel to take all reasonable actions in accordance with the rules of engagement to stop or prevent any observed or suspected instances of physical or mental abuse that could lead to serious injury or death of a detained person in Iraqi custody," it said.

The directive added that soldiers should "promptly report the details through the chain of command so that those acts can be appropriately addressed with Iraqi government officials."

Asked whether Rumsfeld was questioning what was meant by "all reasonable actions," Whitman said: "That would certainly be part of it."

"The secretary, in the way that he typically does, asks questions to try and understand and ensure that the policies and procedures for our service members are well understood in a way that doesn't conflict," Whitman said.

Whitman noted that in other countries, US troops are typically governed by a status of forces agreement with the host country. But US forces have no such agreement with Iraq.

"So you have to make sure your policies and procedures are consistent with the laws of the land that we are in, and are well understood by the miitary personnel that are there," he said.

Rumsfeld alluded to his misgivings Monday during a question-and-answer session with students and faculty at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.


He said "reporting something that looks amiss is good; orally trying to stop something that looks amiss to me sounds very reasonable.

"Then the next question is: what level of force should they use to try to stop it if they see it happening in a country where they dont know the laws, they dont know the culture."
He said the response "could vary depending on whether ... the abusive act or the seemingly inhumane act or possibly illegal act ... is being performed by an official of that government -- a policeman or a soldier -- or just by someone else."






Copyright © 2005 Agence France Presse (http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/afp/SIG=122dhv7qk/**http%3A%2F%2Fwww.afp.com%2Fenglish%2Flinks%2F%3F pid%3Dcopyright)

[Marksix]

"....If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession." - perfectly, eruditely put!

The Law Lords (similar to your supreme court judges)here in the UK today ruled that evidence obtained under torture to be inadmissable in court.

The country's highest court ruled on Thursday that evidence obtained under torture cannot be used in legal hearings, backing the case of eight terrorism suspects and civil rights campaigners.

A panel of seven Law Lords overthrew a decision by the Appeal Court in 2004 that secret tribunals hearing cases relating to the terrorism suspects could consider evidence that would not be acceptable in a criminal court trial.

That meant authorities could consider information that might have been extracted using torture in another country, provided British agents were not directly involved.

"I have to conclude that the duty not to countenance the use of torture by admission of evidence in judicial proceedings must be regarded as paramount and to allow its admission would shock the conscience, abuse or degrade the proceedings and involve the state in moral defilement," Lord Carswell said.

The tide is turning, things are changing.

[lofter1]

He Says Yes to Legalized Torture

ANNE E. KORNBLUT (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=ANNE E. KORNBLUT&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=ANNE E. KORNBLUT&inline=nyt-per)
New York Times
Sunday Dec. 11, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/weekinreview/11kornblut.html


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/12/11/weekinreview/11kornblut.jpg
Katie Falkenberg for The New York Times

In the Fray Charles Krauthammer, conservative conundrum.


WASHINGTON -- AS the debate over torture intensified earlier this month, Charles Krauthammer hit a nerve.

In a Dec. 5 cover essay in The Weekly Standard, the conservative magazine, Mr. Krauthammer argued that torture is not only defensible in certain very limited circumstances, but in fact morally necessary - if, for instance, it would save thousands of civilians by squeezing information about an imminent attack from a captured terrorist.

He was not the first to say so, but in his 4,000-word polemic, Mr. Krauthammer crystallized the case for keeping torture legal in a way that the Bush administration had not, ridiculing the "moral preening" of his critics and taking apart an amendment sponsored by Senator John McCain (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/john_mccain/index.html?inline=nyt-per), point by point, while assailing the administration at the same time.

"Once you have gone public with a blanket ban on all forms of coercion, it is going to be very difficult to publicly carve out exceptions," Mr. Krauthammer wrote. "The Bush administration is to be faulted for having attempted such a codification with the kind of secrecy, lack of coherence, and lack of strict enforcement that led us to the McCain reaction."

In this debate as in so many others, Mr. Krauthammer found himself at the nexus of debate among conservatives; he has, after decades as a public intellectual, weighed in on almost every important issue at some point along the way, including stem cell research, the Iraq war and the debate over creationism and intelligent design.

In some instances, as in the torture debate, he has arguably articulated the administration's stance better than President Bush or his cabinet secretaries. And after years of opposing neoconservatives in their quest to spread democracy abroad, Mr. Krauthammer is now among the firmest supporters of the war in Iraq, so much so that he is occasionally a lightning rod for the war's critics.

But Mr. Krauthammer's views over the years have shifted, prompting many conservatives to wonder just what camp he belongs to.

"He doesn't waffle, and he certainly doesn't have, I think, certain sac